Tabs

22 December 2011

On these chronicles, I have spoken several times about eyedropper transformations of some pens—Pilot Prera, Kaweco Sport, Platinum Preppy… Good, correct writers as those are, they are not the most charming pens in the market, and filling their barrels with ink is a safe bet for having them inked for a long and boring while. But those experiments show a couple of things.

A Kaweco Sport filled as eyedropper. In this case, the italic nib from the Kaweco Calligraphy set makes this pen a lot more interesting.

Making an eyedropper pen is easy. Easy for the user and, more important, easy for the manufacturer. However, very few companies market pens openly as eyedroppers: Stipula, Pilot-Namiki, Romillopens, Danitrio, Eboya-Nebotek,… And with the exception of the Stipula T, all those pens are very expensive. But the market of stylophiles, on its side, demands arcane filling systems like this.

The Stipula T. A good idea for a poorly performing pen.

Stipula seems to be the only company truly understanding this, although its eyedropper-cartridge-converter pen –the Stipula T— does not perform correctly. Then, why do other companies not try this approach? Why do Pilot, Platinum and Sailor not try to create affordable eyedroppers with their admirable selection of nibs? On top of that, as Stipula showed, eyedropper pens are not incompatible with the convenience of cartridges and converters.

Maybe they are pushing us into buying vintage pens instead of their newly crafted goods...